A new partnership with CMC Markets

30th January 2014by Doug Morris, CEO, Sharesight

We’re proud to announce a new partnership with CMC Markets! Now CMC clients in their Premium Traders tier will have access to Sharesight Investor Plan for no cost. Building off our existing relationship, in which CMC trade and holdings data is shared automatically with Sharesight, investors who place at least 30 trades per month will now have access to up to three portfolios with unlimited holdings and trades on Sharesight as part of their CMC package.

Bottom line, if you trade with CMC you don’t need to setup your portfolio. It’s done with one click of the mouse, with all on-going trades coming through automatically. It’s like Sharesight’s existing portfolio setup process on steroids. Online broking and Sharesight go hand in hand. CMC gets this, which is why they were our first brokerage partner and were keen to put a second arrangement in place.

It’s a no brainer mate, CMC & Sharesight makes sense.

Sometimes investors (and even accountants and advisers) ask us “why?” “Why do I need a portfolio tool when I can see my holdings and performance on my broker’s website?” For starters unless you’ve kept your business with one broker since day one of your first dollar invested, your historical cost basis will be incorrect. Most people transfer CHESS sponsored holdings from one broker to the next. Once moved across, your historical costs basis is lost so any performance “calculation” incorrectly begins with whatever balance you’ve transferred. Also, since your broker isn’t always privy to dividends (reinvested or paid out) or holdings you have on wraps, platforms, or with other institutions, your preferred online broker is likely not giving you an accurate or complete picture.

Furthermore come tax time, most online brokers don’t offer comprehensive capital gains or dividend income tax calculation, nor reporting tools. Nor do they want to build them. That where Sharesight comes in. If you use CMC, for example, your capital gains, losses, and dividend income are all sent through to our tax reports automatically, at the close of each trading day.

Last, but not least, if you’ve enabled your Sharesight + Xero connection that means when you (or your client) make a trade that information goes from CMC to Sharesight to Xero in real time. And automatically without human intervention. This represents a key milestone in our effort to build and encourage an investing ecosystem in which you, the investor, have choice of services and can easily transport your data from one system to the next.

The way we see it, if you can book a holiday and organise a travel itinerary by using your Facebook login, you sure as hell should be able to have your broker talk to your accounting platform.

If trading technology and low cost trading is important to you, then check out CMC Markets. They do most of their development in house, which is rare for a broker and means they’re on the leading edge of investing tools.